History Of Asia

Image source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxMeW-WH1EseZ0kTsAstRHmiI1j-a1o7o505qF_eB3ANerXLz68MwIF93GL1snDxSC-RyFgHCYQmENy6qhUWF-Lld64cw73_gu-DTuwNRwjt4bHlvD-TiyCKcYzLg6xWx39ZxiRqrmehbi/s1600/asia_minor_4th.jpg

To focus on only trade would still cover a vast range of subjects. After all, China is known for many things: jade, rice, tea to name only a few. Of course, expanding that list to illegal substances would include opium and other illicit drugs. To look at just one item tea, can also include many things. After all, families around the realm have been tied to that business. So, give some thought to how powerful the subject of tea must be for it to influence the lives of a family in far off Salem, Massachusetts.

Over the course of many decades, many fortunes were made and lost in the China tea trade. The history of Asia is as broad and varied as the history of the whole world. This may have something to do with the fact that Asia encompasses the largest continent in the realm.

The history of Asia could (and does!) fill huge volumes of text. So, let us focus on one subject: the China Tea Trade. In the early 1800s, not long after the end of the Opium Wars, trade with China began to really expand.

As tea needs to be kept dry, he decided to buy some cheap Chinese dishes and stack the crates of it in the hold, so that the tea would be up high and dry. He was quite pleased to discover, upon reaching Boston, that the china sold for enough money to pay for the whole voyage! In the years to come, one Low brother after another followed him out to China and continued the family business.

As tea is a perishable product, it became critical to get it from the assorted Chinese ports to New York and Boston as quickly as possible. Many of the opium clippers extremely fast ships switched over to the tea trade. Once the tea was in the holds, the race was on to cross the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, loop around the Cape of Good Hope, and then navigate up the Atlantic to reach the American ports.

Large numbers of American merchants wanted to get in on the opening of China, and they negotiated access to several ports: Canton, Shanghai, Ninghsien, Amoy and Foochow. There followed an explosion in interest in the exotic varieties of teas. Suddenly, Americans were drinking Lumking, Imperial, Gunpowder (yes, that is the name of a tea!), Bohea, Oolong and Mowfoong.

One of the primary American companies to get into the tea trade was the Low Brothers. They were the twelve sons of Seth Low, a drug merchant from Salem, Massachusetts. Abiel Abbott Low spent seven years dealing in the tea trade, and he made quite the interesting discovery early on in his career.